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Robb Kunz Art Portfolio | Kinetic Soundworks | Seattle WA

2016 – Shout Out! is a public art endeavor that deals with rapid changes in Seattle and cities around the world. It is about neighborhood memories, collective experiences and their disappearance. Finally, it’s a reaction to redevelopment, loss of affordable housing stock and mass erasure of community history.

Shout Out! culminated with a sound exhibition inside a building slated for demolition and redevelopment. A complex tapestry of voices and sounds will echo throughout the house before falling quiet and finally erupting with a massive Godzilla-style SHOUT!

Under Pier Pressure Index:
Speakers/channels lashed under Jack Block Pier – 8
Length (in feet) of cabling stapled underneath – 350
Non-consecutive days it took to install at optimal tidal conditions – 5
Number of different small vessels utilized – 4
Favorite tools lost to the sea – 3
Law enforcement agencies called out due to false report, interrupting install – 3
Headcount of officers involved – 10
Instances I cried while tangled up in wire and crusted with creosote in a kayak at high tide – 1
Days left in Duwamish Revealed program for you to enjoy the work – 93
Odds I give it will survive the elements and acts of vandalism – 50/50 (ha ha)

Go check it out! Here’s how to get there: MAP to Jack Block Park
Follow path to public pier. At end of boardwalk opening to the pier,
you’ll see a sign/push button on your right.

Winterfest 2014 – Seattle Center
Finishing up the install for Winterfest. Visitors can activate a 2 minute 4 channel broadcast of a rotating sculpture which plays holiday songs from around the world. Recorded with Anne Mathews, Valerie Holt and Annie Ford.

As part of my Artist Trust Fellowship, I put on a Meet the Artist event at Inscape, the former Immigration Center/Jail where I have a workshop. The Lonely Coast, a group I work closely with, performed in my studio looking down on the prison yard below where the audience was located.
I miked them up and amplified them through a loudspeaker into the enormously long hallway, then picked THAT sound at 50 foot intervals as their voices carried down the length. These 8 mics were then rebroadcasted through 8 discrete handmade loudspeakers surrounding the audience. Other accidental sounds like elevator doors closing, footsteps and the jangling keys mixed with the haunting voices in a super reverb surround sound experience.

Mark your calendars for December 7, 2014, for Inscape Open Studios. Aside from all the great work you can see and buy from artists, makers, and designers, you can also experience the grand opening of our permanent installation on immigration in Seattle. Inscape and the Wing Luke Museum will be telling the story of the people and the process of immigration through the building that was the United States Immigration Station & Assay Office. Signs throughout the building will mark significant locations and feature images of the sites before the building was transformed from detention center to creative community. In addition, four artists have contributed pieces that shed light on immigration in various, fascinating ways: a graphic novel, a sound installation, silkscreen prints and encaustic paintings. Come out and share the experiences of the people who walked the halls before us.

Sunday, December 7, 2014
1-6pm with short program in the 1st Floor Lobby at 3pm

Heard last week I got a both an Art Interruptions commission to do a piece in Freeway Park called Sound Showers. It’ll involve rotating parabolic speakers. And then a double whammy with a commission for the Wing Luke’s permanent collection – an interactive audio exhibit utilizing an original jail cell control panel from the INS facility, turned into a trove of narrative histories. Thanks very much to both the City of Seattle as well as the Wing Luke.

Step onto the old INS prison yard. You’re about to be treated to a free concert. One floor above,two young women visible through a lit window perform classic songs about incarceration and persecution. Their voices and instruments are picked up by microphones, reamplified into the massive hallway and picked up via more microphones at varying intervals, which in turn get relayed to speakers surrounding the prison yard below. The sound of their music travels around warming you hauntingly. Concert begins promptly at 8:30 after a brief talk.

I’ve been added to Seattle’s Emerging Artists roster. Hopefully some mid-sized project will be in the works 2014/15. Keep that train moving.

Also got added to the Seattle Storefronts Creative Enterprises roster… we hope a nice banged up space is forthcoming where I can start the Feedback Sound Lab, a facility in which sound sculptures will be completed and tested by the public. This will culminate in a huge exhibition in collaboration with Jherek Bischoff.

Last summer I was commissioned by the ArtsParks program to create a sound exhibition in Occidental Square spanning the month of August. June and July were spent woodworking and building electronics for 10 rotating speaker sculptures that resembled weather vanes or spinning birdhouses, depending who was asked

Meanwhile, various collaborators in far off places collected sounds in their nearby town squares. These I collated and collaged to broadcast from 8 different automated speaker sculptures, immersing the square in a different sonic geography every 30 minutes.